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ARE YOU KIDDING ME BILLY THE KID!
Filed Under NCAA Basketball
Billy Donovan Leaving Florida (Well Not the State) & Going to the Pros as New Head Coach of the Orlando Magic
Sure, Billy Donovan’s decision to leave the University of Florida for the NBA at this time makes a whole lot of sense. He’s coming off repeat national championships, losing all five starters and going to get $5.5 million per season for five years from the Orlando Magic.
And unlike when his mentor Rick Pitino left Kentucky in 1997 for the Boston Celtics under the assumption that the lucky leprechaun would land Tim Duncan in the draft, Donovan is going to a team with a young big man, Dwight Howard, who could turn out to be the best big man in the game in a couple of years.
With that said, Donovan’s decision to leave for the pros is a bit disappointing. Having reached three title games with Florida in 11 years, Donovan had a chance to be a living legend in the college game. While it may have taken him a couple of years to get back to the championship-level status at Florida, Donovan did have a tremendous recruiting class coming in with five-star point guard Nick Calathes and four-star players Chandler Persons, Jai Lucas and Alex Tyus.
Donovan just landed Lucas, the son of former NBA player and coach John Lucas and brother of current Houston Rockets’ guard John Lucas Jr., earlier this month. And Billy the Kid has always been able to recruit and reload, from when he brought a kid from South Dakota by the name of Mike Miller to the school in 1998 to when he nabbed players from Tennessee, Michigan and New Jersey in 2004. Those players were of course Corey Brewer, Al Horford and Joakim Noah.
Who’s not to say that Florida wouldn’t have been back in the title game by the time its incoming class were upperclassmen. At least, Donovan is leaving a full cupboard at Florida, which should hire Anthony Grant of Virginia Commonwealth. Grant was a former assistant to Donovan at Florida and coached the Rams to an upset win against Duke in the first round of this year’s tournament.
With one more national championship, Donovan would have joined current legends Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski with three titles (barring that those two don’t win another one, which isn’t likely in the next couple of seasons). Could you have imagined if Donovan were to win one or two more championships in this modern era of parity? He would be considered the greatest coach of his generation.
Winning an NBA title would be nice, but it won’t have the same feeling as winning one in college. And even if Donovan doesn’t succeed in the pros, he could come back to college like Pitino. However, he would be remembered as just another guy who couldn’t cut it in the pros.
Understanding Donovan, the NBA opportunity is just another chance to prove himself. I’m a big Donovan fan and would like to see him succeed at the next level. His last two Florida teams were superb, legitimate champions who could have competed with a lot of teams from the past. I would have loved to see if Donovan could have reloaded in a couple of seasons and brought a third completely different Gators’ team to the title game.
Donovan has always overcome the odds, beginning when he was a pudgy kid at Providence before being a scoring sensation in his senior year, and now he’s going to try to attain more success on the pro level than other college coaches who failed to make the cut. You know the names. Pitino. John Calipari. Mike Montgomery. P.J. Carlesimo. Jerry Tarkanian. Lon Kruger. Tim Floyd. Leonard Hamilton. OK. Some of those guys didn’t deserve shots in the pros.
Pitino did and had Kentucky rolling in the mid-1990s when he decided to test the pros again after coaching the New York Knicks for a couple of seasons in the late eighties. Now when you think of Pitino, it’s hard not to forget his forgettable run with the Celtics sandwiched between his phenomenal work at Kentucky and Louisville. While Donovan certainly deserved this shot in the pros, he had something special going on at Florida.
When you hear Duke basketball, you will always think Coach K. When you hear Indiana basketball, you think The General. When you would have heard Florida basketball in twenty years, you would have thought of Donovan had he stayed and continued to do what he had been doing.
Donovan has sacrificed that legacy for a shot at the pros. It’s hard to think that an NBA Finals victory would be able to compare to what could have continued to be at Florida. Billy the Kid has bucked the odds before. Can he do it again?
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